Asking someone's age is considered taboo in polite society, and the Social Security Administration appears to have been taking lessons from Miss Manners.
An audit conducted recently by the SSA's inspector general revealed that the agency "did not have controls in place to annotate death information," putting the government at risk for fraud and waste.
CNS News reports that social security numbers of some 6.5 million people born in 1901 and before have been used to open fraudulent bank accounts, while thousands of others have been used by undocumented immigrants to apply for jobs. One person, for example, opened a bank account with a SSN of a person born in 1869.
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According to the Washington Times, Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) and Tom Carper (D-Del.), leaders of the Senate committee to oversee the SSA, issued a joint statement in reaction to the report. "It's incredible that the Social Security Administration in 2015 does not have the technical sophistication to ensure that people they know to be deceased are actually noted as dead," Johnson said.
Carper added that these types of "avoidable problems waste millions of taxpayers' dollars annually... expose our citizens to identify theft, [and] also undermine confidence in our government."
The auditors suggested that the SSA correct the inaccuracies, but the agency protested, saying "the recommendations would create a significant manual and labor-intensive workload and provide no benefit to the administration of our programs."
The SSA says it will work to prevent multiple people from using the same SSN.
